The circumflex ( ˆ ) (often called a "caret Caret, sometimes spelled carat, is the name for the symbol ^ in ASCII and some other character sets. Its Unicode code point is U+005E, and its ASCII code in hexadecimal is 5E. Strictly speaking, the caret character in common use is actually referred to in the Unicode standard as the "CIRCUMFLEX ACCENT"; the Unicode character named "", from the non-diacritical sign (^) of a similar shape) is a diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign) is an ancillary glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός (diakritikós, "distinguishing"). Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the mark used in written Afrikaans Afrikaans is an Indo-European language, derived from Dutch and thus classified as Low Franconian West Germanic. It is mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia, with smaller numbers of speakers living in Botswana, Angola, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Zambia, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Taiwan and Argentina. Due to emigration and, Breton The Breton language is a Celtic language spoken in Brittany (Breizh/Bretagne), France, Croatian The Croatian language is a South Slavic language which is used primarily in Croatia, by Croats in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by Croatian minorities in some neighbouring countries, in the Italian region of Molise, and parts of the Croatian diaspora, Esperanto Esperanto is the most widely spoken constructed international auxiliary language in the world. Its name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof published the first book detailing Esperanto, the Unua Libro, in 1887. The word esperanto means "one who hopes" in the language itself. Zamenhof's goal was to, French French is a Romance language spoken, around the world, by more than 100 million people as a first language (mother tongue), by 190 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 54 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France, where the language, Frisian West Frisian is a language spoken mostly in the province of Friesland (Fryslân) in the north of the Netherlands. West Frisian is the name by which this language is usually known outside of the Netherlands, to distinguish it from the closely related Frisian languages of Saterland Frisian and North Frisian, which are spoken in Germany. Within the, Italian Italian ( italiano , or lingua italiana) is a Romance language spoken by about 60 million people in Italy, and by a total of around 70 million in the world. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four official languages. It is also the official language of San Marino, as well as the primary language of Vatican City. Standard Italian, adopted by the, Romanized Japanese The romanization of Japanese or rōmaji ( listen (help·info)) is the use of the Latin alphabet to write the Japanese language. Japanese is normally written in logographic characters borrowed from Chinese (kanji) and syllabic scripts (kana). The romanization of Japanese is done in any context where Japanese text is targeted at those who do not, Norwegian Norwegian is a North Germanic language spoken primarily in Norway, where it is an official language. Together with Swedish and Danish, Norwegian forms a continuum of more or less mutually intelligible local and regional variants (see Danish language#Classification), Romanized Persian Transliteration attempts to be a complete representation of the original writing, so that an informed reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words. Transliterations of Persian are used to represent individual Persian words or short quotations, in scholarly texts in English or other languages that do, Portuguese Portuguese ( português or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and northern Portugal. It is derived from the Latin spoken by the romanized Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula (namely the Gallaeci, the Lusitanians, the Celtici and the Conii) around 2000 years ago. It spread worldwide in the 15th, Romanian Romanian or Daco-Romanian ; self-designation: limba română, pronounced [ˈlimba roˈmɨnə]) is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova. It has official status in Romania, Moldova, and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia. In the Republic of Moldova, the language is officially, Serbian The Serbian language is a South Slavic language, spoken chiefly in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and in the Serbian diaspora. Standard Serbian is based on the Shtokavian dialect, like the modern Croatian and Bosnian, with which it is mutually intelligible, and was previously unified with under the standard known as Serbo-, Slovak The Slovak language ( slovenský jazyk , slovenčina , not to be confused with slovenščina), or Slovenian, is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages (together with Czech, Polish, Silesian, Kashubian, and Sorbian), Turkish Turkish (Türkçe IPA [ˈt̪yɾktʃe] ) is spoken as a first language by over 63 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Cyprus, with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania and other parts of Eastern, Vietnamese Vietnamese , formerly known under French colonization as Annamese (see Annam), is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of the Vietnamese people (người Việt or người Kinh), who constitute 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese, most of whom live in the United States. It, Welsh Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of Celtic spoken natively in Wales, in England by some along the Welsh border and in the Welsh immigrant colony in the Chubut Valley in Argentine Patagonia and other languages. It received its English name from Latin Latin is an Italic language historically spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe. Romance languages such as Italian, French, Catalan, Romanian, Spanish, and Portuguese are descended from Latin, while many others, especially European languages, including circumflexus (bent about)—a translation of the Greek περισπωμένη (perispōménē).

Pitch

The circumflex accent was first used in the polytonic orthography Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The complex polytonic orthography which notated Ancient Greek phonology was used until 1982, when it was supplanted by the simplified monotonic orthography, which corresponds to Modern Greek phonology, and requires only two diacritics of Ancient Greek Ancient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic , Classical (c. 5th–4th centuries BC), and Hellenistic (c. 3rd century BC–6th century AD) periods of ancient Greece and the ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek. Its Hellenistic phase is known as Koine, where it occurred (subject to certain rules) on the accented syllable of a word, on long vowels In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Arabic,, and where there was a rise and then a fall in pitch Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words. The term has been used to describe the Scandinavian languages,. Sometimes it takes the form of a tilde The tilde (pronounced /ˈtɪldə/ or /ˈtɪldeɪ/) is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning a title or superscription, though the term “tilde” has evolved in that language and now has a different meaning in linguistics or an inverted breve A breve is a diacritical mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. It looks similar to the caron (i.e. wedge or háček in Czech), but the caron has a sharp tip, whilst the breve is rounded. Compare Ǎ ǎ Ě ě Ǐ ǐ Ǒ ǒ Ǔ ǔ (caron) with Ă ă Ĕ ĕ Ĭ ĭ Ŏ ŏ Ŭ ŭ (breve). Since Modern Greek Modern Greek refers to the varieties of Greek spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic modern features of the language had been present has a stress accent In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense instead of a pitch accent, this diacritic has been replaced with an acute accent The acute accent is a diacritic mark used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts in the modern monotonic orthography. The circumflex accent placed over a vowel symbol may also indicate, in some languages, that the vowel or the syllable containing it is to be pronounced in a certain way. For example, in French, the mark ^ indicates that the vowel so marked is both of a certain quality and long. In Albanian, ˘ indicates that the vowel is nasalized and stressed. In Classical Greek, the mark ~ shows that the syllable beneath bears the word accent and is pronounced, according to the ancient grammarians, with a rise and fall in pitch.

Length

The circumflex accent marks a long vowel In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Arabic, in the orthography The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Orthography is derived from Greek ὀρθός orthós ("correct") and γράφειν gráphein ("to write"). Orthography is distinct from typography or transliteration From an information-theoretical point of view, transliteration is a mapping from one system of writing into another, word by word, or ideally letter by letter. Transliteration attempts to use a one-to-one correspondence and be exact, so that an informed reader should be able to reconstruct the original spelling of unknown transliterated words. To of several languages.

• Akkadian Akkadian (also Accadian, Assyro-Babylonian) is an extinct Semitic language (part of the greater Afro-Asiatic language family) that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate. The name of the language is. In the transliteration of this language, the circumflex indicates a long vowel resulting from an aleph ʾĀlep is the reconstructed name of the first letter of the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, continued in descended Semitic alphabets as Phoenician Aleph , Syriac 'Ālaph ܐ, Hebrew Aleph א, and Arabic ʾAlif ا contraction.
• French French is a Romance language spoken, around the world, by more than 100 million people as a first language (mother tongue), by 190 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 54 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France, where the language. The circumflex is used on â, ê, î, ô, û and, in some varieties of the language, such as in Belgian pronunciation, these vowels are often long; fête ("party") is longer than faites. Historically, it often represents an earlier 's' (hôpital < hospital).
• Standard Friulian Friulian ( furlan or affectionately marilenghe in Friulian, friulano in Italian) (also Eastern Ladin), more properly Friulan in English, is a Romance language belonging to the Rhaetian family, spoken in the Friuli region of northeastern Italy. Friulian has around 800,000 speakers, the vast majority of whom also speak Italian. It is sometimes.
• Japanese Japanese (日本語, Nihongo ?) IPA: [nʲihoŋɡo] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Japonic-Ryukyuan languages. Its relationships with other languages remain undemonstrated. It is an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics. In the Kunrei-shiki Kunrei-shiki rōmaji is a romanization system, i.e. a system for transcribing the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet. It is abbreviated as Kunrei-shiki. Its name is rendered Kunreisiki using Kunrei-shiki itself system of Romanization The romanization of Japanese or rōmaji ( listen (help·info)) is the use of the Latin alphabet to write the Japanese language. Japanese is normally written in logographic characters borrowed from Chinese (kanji) and syllabic scripts (kana). The romanization of Japanese is done in any context where Japanese text is targeted at those who do not, and occasionally in the Hepburn The Hepburn romanization system is named after James Curtis Hepburn, who used it to transcribe the sounds of the Japanese language into the Latin alphabet in the third edition of his Japanese–English dictionary, published in 1887. The system was originally proposed by the Society for the Romanization of the Japanese Alphabet (羅馬字会 Rō system (as a surrogate for the macron A macron, from Greek μακρόv meaning "long", is a diacritic placed over or under a vowel, originally used to mark a long (i.e., heavy) syllable in Græco-Roman metrics, but now also indicates that the vowel is long. (The opposite is a breve ˘, used to indicate originally a short syllable and now also a short vowel.) Distinctions).
• Jèrriais Jèrriais is the form of the Norman language spoken in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, off the coast of France. It has been in decline over the past century as English has increasingly become the language of education, commerce and administration. There are very few people who speak Jèrriais as a mother tongue and, owing to the age of the.
• Turkish Turkish (Türkçe IPA [ˈt̪yɾktʃe] ) is spoken as a first language by over 63 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Cyprus, with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania and other parts of Eastern. According to Turkish Language Association orthography, düzeltme işareti ("correction mark") over a and u is primarily used to indicate a long vowel In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in many other languages, for instance in Arabic, on a basis of disambiguation. For example ama (but) against âmâ (blind), şura (that place, there) against şûra (council).^[1] Although official, the required system is complex and younger generations gradually decline using it.^{[citation needed]}
• Welsh Welsh is a member of the Brythonic branch of Celtic spoken natively in Wales, in England by some along the Welsh border and in the Welsh immigrant colony in the Chubut Valley in Argentine Patagonia. The circumflex is colloquially known as the to bach ("little roof"). It lengthens a vowel (a, e, i, o, u, w, y), and is used particularly to differentiate between homographs In linguistics, a homonym is one of a group of words that share the same spelling and the same pronunciation but have different meanings, usually as a result of the two words having different origins. The state of being a homonym is called homonymy; e.g. tan and tân, ffon and ffôn, pin and pîn, gem and gêm, cyn and cŷn, or gwn and gŵn.
• J. R. R. Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion would use the circumflex to denote a long vowel when transcribing words from his fictional languages.

Height

The circumflex is also used to indicate the relative height In phonetics, a vowel is a sound in spoken language, such as English ah! [ɑː] or oh! [oʊ], pronounced with an open vocal tract so that there is no build-up of air pressure at any point above the glottis. This contrasts with consonants, such as English sh! [ʃː], where there is a constriction or closure at some point along the vocal tract. A of some vowels:

• Portuguese Portuguese ( português or língua portuguesa) is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and northern Portugal. It is derived from the Latin spoken by the romanized Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula (namely the Gallaeci, the Lusitanians, the Celtici and the Conii) around 2000 years ago. It spread worldwide in the 15th â /ɐ/, ê /e/, and ô /o/ are higher vowels than á /a/, é /ɛ/, and ó /ɔ/, respectively. The circumflex is only used on stressed In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense vowels.
• Vietnamese â /ɐ/, ê /e/, and ô /o/ are higher vowels than a /ɑ/, e /ɛ/, and o /ɔ/. The circumflex can appear together with a tone mark on the same vowel, as in the word Việt Nam. Vowels with circumflex are considered separate letters from the base vowels.

Letter extension

• In Bulgarian, when transliterated with the Latin alphabet (in systems used prior to 1989), the sound represented in Bulgarian by 'â', although called a schwa (misleadingly suggesting an unstressed lax sound), is more accurately described as a mid back unrounded vowel /ɤ/. Unlike English or French, but similar to Romanian and Afrikaans, it can be stressed. The Cyrillic letter 'ъ' (er goljam) sometimes is transliterated as 'â' or 'ŭ'; often it is just written as 'a' or 'u'.
• In Chichewa, ŵ denotes the voiced bilabial fricative /β/, hence the name of the country Malaŵi.
• In Esperanto, it is used on ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ. It indicates a different consonant from the unaccented form, and is considered a separate letter for purposes of collation. See Esperanto orthography.
• In pinyin romanized Mandarin Chinese, the circumflex occurs only on ê, which is used to represent the sound /ɛ/ in isolation. This sound occurs rarely and is only used as an exclamation.
• In Romanian, the circumflex is used on the vowels â and î to mark the vowel /ɨ/, similar to Russian yery. The names of these accented letters are â din a and î din i, respectively. Note: the letter â appears only in the middle of words; thus, its majuscule version appears only in all-capitals inscriptions.
• In Slovak, the circumflex (vokáň) turns the letter o into a diphthong ô /wo/.
• In Old Tupi, the circumflex indicated a semivowel, therefore î was [j], û was [w], and ŷ was a unique semivowel intermediate to these.

Tone

In some African languages, the grave accent is used to indicate a falling tone.

Other regular uses

• In Afrikaans it simply marks a vowel with an irregular pronunciation that is typically stressed. Examples of circumflex use in Afrikaans are sê (to say), wêreld (world), môre (tomorrow) and brûe (bridges).
• In Croatian and Serbian it is mostly found above the letter a. Its function is to distinguish homophones. Examples include sam (am) versus sâm (alone). Thus the correct translation of "I am alone" is Ja sam sâm. This indicates a falling pitch, albeit less vital than other tonal languages. Another example: da (yes), dâ (gives).
• In French, it generally marks the former presence of the letter s in the spelling of the word – for example, hôpital (hospital), hôtel (hostel), forêt (forest), rôtir (to roast), côte (coast), pâte (paste). Since the older spelling is often one on which English words are based, as in the foregoing examples, the circumflex provides a helpful guide to Anglophone readers of French. Fenêtre (window), for instance, is derived from the Latin word fenestra; the s is seen in the English word defenestrate derived from that Latin root. Certain close homophones are distinguished by the circumflex, for instance cote ("level", "mark") and côte ("rib" or "coast"). The letter ê is also normally pronounced open, like è. In the usual pronunciations of central and northern France, ô is pronounced close, like eau; in Southern France, no distinction is made between close and open o. See also Use of the circumflex in French.
• In Turkish, the circumflex over a and u is used to indicate when a preceding consonant (k, g, l) is to be pronounced as a palatal plosive; [c], [ɟ] (kâğıt, gâvur, mahkûm, Gülgûn) or alveolar lateral [l] (Elâzığ, Halûk). The circumflex over i is used to indicate a nisba suffix (millî, dinî).^[1]
• In Welsh, the circumflex, apart from being used as a lengthening sign (see above), is sometimes used with plural forms, notably where the singular ends in an a, to indicate the stressed syllable (which would normally be on the penultimate syllable), e.g. camera, drama, opera, sinema → camerâu, dramâu, operâu, sinemâu.

Exceptional use

• In English the circumflex, like other diacriticals, is sometimes retained on loanwords that used it in the original language; for example, rôle. In Britain in the eighteenth century—before the cheap penny post and an era in which paper was taxed—the circumflex was used in postal letters to save room in an analogy with the French use. Specifically, the letters "ugh" were replaced when they were silent in the most common words, e.g., "thô" for "though", "thorô" for "thorough", and "brôt" for "brought".
• In French, m with a circumflex is an informal abbreviation for même, "same," for example in taking notes.
• In Italian, î is sometimes used in the plural of nouns and adjectives ending with -io [jo], although the spelling with a normal i is by far the most usual one. Other possible spellings are -ii and obsolete -j or -ij. For example, the plural of vario ['vaːrjo] ("various") can be spelt vari, varî, varii; the pronunciation will usually stay ['vaːri] with only one [i].
• In Norwegian, it is used, with the exception of loan words, on ô and ê, almost exclusively in the words "fôr" (from Norse fóðr), meaning "animal food" and the related verb "fôre", "to feed", to differentiate it from for (the preposition); lêr, meaning "skin" (Norse leðr) and "vêr" (Norse veðr), meaning "weather" or "ram", both lêr and vêr only in the Nynorsk Norwegian.
• In Swedish, when transcribing dialectal speech, the circumflex is often used to denote an a or o which is pronounced dialectally as if it has been written ä [æ] or ö [ø].

Mathematics

In mathematics, the circumflex is used to modify variable names; it is usually read "hat", e.g. î is "i hat".

In vector notation, it is used to identify unit vectors; for instance î stands for a unit vector in the direction of the x-axis.

In statistics, it is often used for the maximum likelihood estimator of a parameter.

Technical notes

The ISO-8859-1 character encoding includes the letters â, ê, î, ô, û, and their respective capital forms. Dozens more letters with the circumflex are available in Unicode. Unicode also uses the circumflex as a combining character with the code point U+0302.

See also

• Caret
• Caron
• Macron
• Tilde
• Turned v

References

1. ^ ^{a b} www.tdk.gov.tr

External links

• Diacritics Project — All you need to design a font with correct accents
• Keyboard Help - Learn how to create world language accent marks and other diacriticals on a computer

Categories: Alphabetic diacritics | Greek alphabet

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